James Morrison

James Morrison is Associate Professor in Journalism at the University of Stirling. He spent over a decade as a staff reporter for regional and national news organisations including the Press Association and the Independent on Sunday, and has worked as a freelance writer for numerous titles ranging from the Guardian, Telegraph Magazine and the Times Educational Supplement to History Today, the Ecologist and Museums Journal. His research interests focus on the interplay between media and political representations of marginalised groups, their lived experiences and public attitudes towards them. In addition to publishing in a number of peer-reviewed journals, his books include Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Scroungers: Moral Panics and Media Myths (Zed Books, 2019) and The Left Behind: Reimagining Britain's Socially Excluded (Pluto Press, 2022). Scroungers was praised in The Guardian for making 'many salient and persuasive arguments, most notably regarding the abstract fetishisation of work and the grim reality of work in neoliberal Britain', while Chas Critcher (co-author with the late Stuart Hall of Policing the Crisis) described it as 'a highly original contribution to the sociology of hate' - drawing on 'a forensic analysis of ideological ploys by right-wing politicians, wilfully distorted narratives in traditional media and vitriolic outpourings on social media'. Reviewing The Left Behind, Lancaster University's Tracey Jensen described it as 'a sophisticated interrogation of how the 'left behind' are mythologised, problematised and weaponised by those whose insights rarely stretch beyond regional condescension and recycled tropes'. James is also a member of the Public Affairs Board of the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) and the author of a set textbook for journalism students and trainees: Essential Public Affairs for Journalists (OUP).